AI ambient listening tools allow doctors to “actually sit, look at my patient, listen to them.”

Northeast Missouri Health Council, the federally qualified health center [FQHC] in Kirksville, began testing an AI ambient listening program last year.

With permission, this technology listens in on the conversations between doctors and patients and then creates a summary clinic note for the doctor to review.

Dr. Matthew Tilton was the first physician at Northeast Missouri Health Council to trial the technology, and he recently sat down with Amy Baumgartner to speak about how AI ambient listening is helping him focus less on note taking and more on his connection with patients.

The FQHC intends to roll out the tool throughout the entire clinic in the next few months.

Dr. Matthew Tilton: One of the things, when I was trialing this, is I really wanted people to be aware that it was happening. So, I would say, “Hey, I have this new technology today, AI Scribe. It just sits there, and it listens.”

It actually not only listens to the conversation but makes sense of it. When I say, “Hey, how are you feeling?” And farmer Bob says, “I'm dead.” It knows that he doesn't mean he is actually dead. It understands that.

And it actually makes a SOAP [Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan] note — that's a term we use in the healthcare community to describe a physician's note, and it makes a template that we then review, we make sure everything is correct, and then we sign off on it.

It allows us to have more interaction with the patient, that classic eye contact that we were taught in medical school, that we didn't get to do for so long because we were on the computer. We get to have that back now.

I get to have an actual conversation. I don't have to run out and do all these things and be looking at my laptop the entire time. It's really gotten me back to being a natural physician.

We do not currently use any type of clinical decision-making technology within our AI system. There are clinical decision AIs available. I have trialed them. They seem to work very well for what I call “cookbook medicine” — very simple.

With a lot of complexity, which a lot of our patients do have, it becomes much less useful, I'm going to say. It doesn't have the ability to really assess the patient's interest. It doesn't know what the patient's compliance is going to be. It doesn't know if they can afford a medication. It just really can't do that human aspect that the physician can.

Provided by Northeast Missouri Health Council

I don't know how many times we will give someone, for example, a depression screen, and it will be zero. As I talk to them, I see that they are dealing with some depression or some anxiety, or maybe it's a symptom that they didn't even know was a symptom.

I'm talking with them, and they say, “Yeah, it is weird. I'm having this chest pain when I work out.” That's important. We got we got to hear more about that, and I feel like, as we were running people through, and we were clicking all these boxes and sending all these orders — we were losing that.

We were missing, you know, the individual things that make people who they are, and I feel like I'm just a much better physician because I get to actually sit, look at my patient, listen to them, and I'm not worried about all these other things.

Amy Baumgartner: You know, to tag onto that, Dr Tilton is very approachable with his patients. If he says it, they trust him, you know. So, there’s that relationship that he's built with his patients, too. So, when he says, “This is just a tool that I'm using, and, you know, it's going to help me today,” they believe that, and they know that, and they're okay with that